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David Cross talks Jeffrey Tambor, NYT interview & Charlyne Yi incident in new interviews

The Arrested Development cast interview in The NY Times is not the only bit of awkwardness David Cross has been involved with this week. (And more on that below.) Tuesday night he appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to talk Arrested Development‘s upcoming fifth season as well as his upcoming “Oh Come On” tour. Things were going well and they reminisced about their time together writing on the Dana Carvey Show, until Cross got offended when Colbert couldn’t think of anything funny Cross did during that time, and stormed off stage spewing expletives. Colbert ran after Cross and they made up, and finished the interview. It’s pretty clearly a bit but nonetheless uncomfortable. Watch:

UPDATE: As to that NY Times interview, David Cross had an interview scheduled with Gothamist today that unsurprisingly changed course to be mostly about the Times interview:

Whenever there’s an occasion that somebody cries, it doesn’t matter how many times they’ve cried before, that’s a bad thing. That is never good. And again, I was there and it was not cool. It was a tough thing to be a part of, a tough thing to have untold. And it didn’t last for 30 seconds, it was a couple minutes.

And again Jeffrey apologized, but that was hours later. He made a big mea culpa to the cast and the crew, but the damage was done. Again, that didn’t come out of nowhere, he’s not American Psycho or whatever. I think Jason pointed this out, but we didn’t know about the Transparent stuff, I hadn’t seen that behavior ever from him in 15 years. I have now. And that goes into the pile of what I know about Jeffrey. But up until that point I’d never seen that.

It was not good, not right. And then obviously Jessica’s been holding that in. And I think she probably experienced what a lot of people do…she had a different experience in every way with that situation. I think it’s…nope, I better shut up.

There’s a lot more to this — including a part where Cross (who’s calling from Los Angeles) randomly runs into Transparent castmember Gabby Hoffman on the street — which you can read at Gothamist.

Meanwhile, in an interview with AV Club that was, in part, to plug his appearance at the upcoming AV Club Comedy Festival in Chicago, they talked about about doing Cross’s confrontational, ironic style of standup post-#METOO, and the accusations of racism comedian Charlyne Yi made against him:

AVC: You’ve been workshopping your new stuff since the emergence of #MeToo, including after what happened between you and Charlyne Yi. Has that informed your material at all?

DC: Only in the sense that I make a #MeToo reference because my wife [Amber Tamblyn] is a founder and prominent figure in the Times Up movement. She’s very active in that world. I have a couple of jokes, or bits around that, and being married to her, raising a daughter with her. We don’t agree on everything. There’s no material I’m not doing… Oh, actually there’s a joke I have where I do the joke—and I never would have done this prior to the Charlyne Yi thing—I say, “I feel obligated to tell everybody, because of something that happened on the internet, that I’m not a racist.” Then I tell the joke and then go into another joke that is about not being a racist, but it’s a joke. That’s something that I never would have felt obligated to tell strangers, “Oh, by the way, despite what you read, I’m not a racist.”

Cross goes on to talk more about the incident as well as the online backlash:

It was a very strange, upsetting thing to know that people—and I still get shit to this very day—that people who don’t know me truly believe that I’m a racist, which is so far from the truth. Of course, the key to that sentence is people who don’t know me. Anybody who knows me knows that’s ridiculous.

I remember when they made the first [Onion Comedy & Arts Festival] announcement. Then I retweeted it, and then within five minutes, this was a couple weeks ago, somebody’s first response was, “Unless it’s going to be an hour of apologizing to Charlyne Yi for being a racist, then I’m not interested.” I was like, “Oh, all right.” I wanted to tweet back, “Well, it’s gonna be an hour and a half, but you can leave early if you want.” But then I thought better of it.

Yeah, I mean, I get “You racist piece of shit,” all kinds of horrible invective. It’s just weird that my daughter can at some point skim through that shit and go, “Hey, daddy, you’re a racist?” “No,” and try to explain it to her. That was a bit out of the blue.

You can read the whole interview at AV Club.

Though David’s “Oh Come On” tour starts soon, he’s still got a couple “Shootin’ The Shit” shows in Brooklyn, including tonight (5/24) at Littlefield (tickets at the door), and May 30 at Knitting Factory (sold out).